Phillip WNY
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Feb 14, 2022
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Back in the day when Netflix was about mailing DVD's, I hacked that system into the ground with new accounts. If you started off an a three-disk plan and upgraded to 5, there was often no upgrade fee during the first month. I had disks coming in daily that I burned to DVD-R media and took them straight to the post office a few hours later. That meant I was getting and sending back disks on the same day. You can get a lot of DVDs that way. I created a large collection of titles and remember storing them away back in 2004 as we moved to a new house. Then I discovered DVD-R media is simply not stable in the long term. Over time, errors gradually became greater and greater until you'd get an unreadable disk. Some media brands were better than others, but it became clear to me a phonograph record or tape recording was much more likely to outlast any DVD-R. By 2020, that had proven true. Most of those DVDs are no longer reliable.
I don't know if Blu-Ray recordable media will have a better track record, but I'd be wary.
By the mid 2010s my philosophy turned against physical media because almost everything I'd ever wanted was available to stream from somewhere, so what was the point of downloading and saving anything? Just go online and stream it. Then the corporate mentality reared its ugly head once again and shows rapidly started disappearing from streaming services, either to sell to broadcast partners, open a window of exclusivity to sell new DVD boxsets, and more lately bring all content back to the creator's own streaming service (ie. NBC shows to Peacock, CBS to Paramount+, etc.) A lot of more obscure titles simply went completely offline, especially TV series from the 1960s and 70s. Now many are licensed out to MeTV, RetroTV, and other similar networks.
So now I don't even start a new series unless I have copies stored locally, because there is every chance it will disappear off the streaming platform before I've seen it. HBOMax is doing that right now with a lot of content that disappears with no warning. The only reason they are cutting the library is so they can sell those shows to cable networks and television stations.
My storage solution is Plex tied to three NAS servers with a combined space of around 75TB. One of the NAS boxes currently has four 6TB drives and I will rotate those out to 18TB drives later this year. Everything is RAID10 for me for maximum protection against drive failure. Yes it means I am sacrificing potential space because RAID10 basically means a 1GB size show takes 2GB to store. I prefer reliability over storage space. A few weeks ago, one of the 6TB drives I bought in 2016 reported a failure, so I slipped in a spare and it rebuilt that new drive with the content I could have lost. No muss, no fuss. Historically, I have been buying one Synology 920+ a year and populating each with four drives. The 920+ is now discontinued, but that is okay because I just need future NAS boxes to have storage space accessible to my main Plex NAS. As space runs out, you can either do the math of the cost of upgrading say four existing hard drives to greater capacity drives, or simply buy another NAS and use cheaper, lower capacity drives in it. I have done both depending on how much things cost at the time.
I don't know if Blu-Ray recordable media will have a better track record, but I'd be wary.
By the mid 2010s my philosophy turned against physical media because almost everything I'd ever wanted was available to stream from somewhere, so what was the point of downloading and saving anything? Just go online and stream it. Then the corporate mentality reared its ugly head once again and shows rapidly started disappearing from streaming services, either to sell to broadcast partners, open a window of exclusivity to sell new DVD boxsets, and more lately bring all content back to the creator's own streaming service (ie. NBC shows to Peacock, CBS to Paramount+, etc.) A lot of more obscure titles simply went completely offline, especially TV series from the 1960s and 70s. Now many are licensed out to MeTV, RetroTV, and other similar networks.
So now I don't even start a new series unless I have copies stored locally, because there is every chance it will disappear off the streaming platform before I've seen it. HBOMax is doing that right now with a lot of content that disappears with no warning. The only reason they are cutting the library is so they can sell those shows to cable networks and television stations.
My storage solution is Plex tied to three NAS servers with a combined space of around 75TB. One of the NAS boxes currently has four 6TB drives and I will rotate those out to 18TB drives later this year. Everything is RAID10 for me for maximum protection against drive failure. Yes it means I am sacrificing potential space because RAID10 basically means a 1GB size show takes 2GB to store. I prefer reliability over storage space. A few weeks ago, one of the 6TB drives I bought in 2016 reported a failure, so I slipped in a spare and it rebuilt that new drive with the content I could have lost. No muss, no fuss. Historically, I have been buying one Synology 920+ a year and populating each with four drives. The 920+ is now discontinued, but that is okay because I just need future NAS boxes to have storage space accessible to my main Plex NAS. As space runs out, you can either do the math of the cost of upgrading say four existing hard drives to greater capacity drives, or simply buy another NAS and use cheaper, lower capacity drives in it. I have done both depending on how much things cost at the time.
